Investing

Best Buy, the big box retailer that most shoppers have abandoned sometime in the last decade and a half in favor of Amazon.com, announced better-than-expected earnings for the last three months of 2014, which includes the all-important holiday season.

The announcement sent the financial media into a frenzy, as many had all but dismissed Best Buy, even after positive results from the third quarter of 2014. To exemplify Best Buy’s performance and overall sentiment at that time, the Motley Fool presented this five-year chart, comparing Best Buy’s stock price changes over that particular time to the performance of the S&P 500, a popular benchmark for stocks.

Here we have a stock that returned -10.9% while the rest of the stock market returned a cumulative 87.35%.

When it comes to the stock market and companies that have public stock available to trade, everyone in the industry including the journalists would prefer if you just look at the charts and make decisions based on the data they choose to show. It’s all in the charts.

And by “all” I mean lies and manipulation, hidden in the “truth” of absolute numbers.

The visual implication with this chart is that Best Buy is a company to keep out of your portfolio. Unless Well, there are some who believe an underperforming stock is a good bargain, if they feel there is some inherent value that the rest of the market is ignoring — a highly unlikely situation. That’s not the impression a reader would get from the article that accompanies the chart.

Compare the chart above with one released today by CNN Money on the occasion of Best Buy’s most recent announcement.

This chart from CNN Money, comparing Best Buy’s stock with an exchange-traded fund that represents the retail industry (XRT), begins tracking the comparison on some undefined date in 2012 and boldly announces a conclusion based on these cherry-picked data.

Maybe everyone was wrong about Best Buy after all, and not only does the retailer’s expectation-beating performance for the latter half of 2014 signal that the company is not focused on the past, and is not depending on what is becoming an antiquated model of shopping for technology, but it has also been a good investment all along!

Well, just for fun, I made my own chart with a comparison between BBY and XRT.

This chart, as accurate as the other charts above, clearly shows that Best Buy (blue line in the chart) has been a bad investment at the same time CNN Money tries to show it has been a good investment. Over this period of time, the stock has returned -8.16% while the retail sector (red line in the chart) returned a positive 16.26% overall.

You can as easily and inaccurately draw whatever conclusions you like from my set of data (aided by Google Finance’s charting facility) as you may draw from CNN Money’s chart. “Best Buy has been better buy than other retail stocks” — but not for customers who invest at times that would invalidate that conclusion!

In fact, if you bought Best Buy stock on the day The Street discussed Best Buy’s third quarter results from 2014 and held that stock until yesterday, the investment would have grown 8.68%, compared with 8.90% for the retail sector measured by XRT. Marginally worse than the industry — and a bad sign for a company whose outlook was more positive.

I’m not accusing anyone of lying. But it’s easy and simple for the media to design “accurate and truthful” stock market charts that show almost whatever they want in order to support the conclusion on which any particular writer has already decided. The visual charts have more power to convince people of an opinion than they probably should have, thanks to their ease of being manipulated and their immediate communication of a message.

Let’s go back a little farther in Best Buy’s performance history. When Best Buy announced its results for the second quarter of 2014, its performance was worse than expected. Here’s what Fortune Magazine had to say at that time:

Revenue dropped 4% to $8.9 billion for the quarter ended Aug. 2, worse than the $8.98 billion projected by analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. Domestic same-store sales dropped 2%, while they fell 6.7% in international markets. Both declines were worse than what Best Buy reported in the year-ago period.

Best Buy has faced a tough challenge from online retailers, which have reported higher sales growth than brick-and-mortar stores. Online purveyors like Amazon.com also provide customers greater clarity about where to get the best deals for the latest gadgets.

Here’s what you do when you run a public company. When you beat the analysts’ predictions, explain how your good management and leadership resulted in success. When your company doesn’t perform as well as expected, explain how forces beyond your control (systemic failure, market trends, government regulations, etc.) prevented success.

How do you reconcile performance in one good quarter with an analysis that explained bad performance in a previous quarter? In Best Buy’s case, did people start seeing Amazon.com’s dominance as just a phase? Is online shopping just a fad, good enough for day-to-day purchases, but when the importance of holiday shopping is clear, consumers start wandering around big box stores? Now that Best Buy has had two positive quarters, is it finally in a position where it can stop adapting to a changing consumer culture?

Imagine how things would sound if companies reversed their attribution theory, if they took credit for short-term failures and blamed others for short-term success?

“We performed worse than the market’s expectations this quarter because our CEO failed to lead the company through changing consumer trends.”

“We are excited about new tax incentives that have allowed us to show a profit in our financial records when we otherwise would have lost money.”

Who would invest in a company whose public relations department said these things?

There’s a kernel of truth to everything, but picking which truths apply to any particular time period’s stock price performance is pure guesswork. Investors continue to read the financial media’s commentary and make decisions based on the advice, explicit or implicit, therein.

Wall Street analysts do work hard, as do the journalists who make sense of an interpret those analyses. The system keeps a fair amount of individuals employed — but they are employed in the entertainment industry.

The best thing any consumer can do it keep the following in mind:

If you see a stock market chart, someone is trying to manipulate you and your opinions.

Just for fun, here’s another chart that compares Best Buy’s performance since roughly the beginning of XRT’s existence in 2006. Best Buy looks like a pretty big loser today.

Over the years, I haven’t been too kind to the best-selling author, Robert Kiyosaki. He’s certainly built a successful empire, and a large community people respect him for his business acumen, his willingness to try or to appear to try to help others, and his advice. However, I’ve always found his advice thin at best and dangerous at worst. I received his latest book, Second Chance: For Your Money, Your Life, and Our World, and before opening the book to the first page, I decided to give Kiyosaki his own second chance — and read the book with an open mind. His publisher probably didn’t read my previous commentary before offering to send me a copy for review.

I read the entire book on a flight from Phoenix to Philadelphia, and my second chance paid off — I thought this book was an improvement over Kiyosaki’s earlier works(I’ve only read a few), yet not without its frustrations.

Kiyosaki uses several devices in his latest book to tell his story. The first is an all-out admiration of Buckminster Fuller, starting with the book’s dedication and infiltrating every chapter. This makes some sense, as Kiyosaki has always used some of Fuller’s literary techniques, which I’ll get into a little further down this page. Fuller was a futurist, and more than any of Kiyosaki’s other books, Second Chance also takes a look at the future and the decisions one can make therein as a way of dealing with the economic struggles of today’s post-recession world.

It was Kiyosaki’s so-called “poor dad” who first admired Fuller, and this early glorification set the wheels in motion for an approach to life that would favor the lessons of the author’s “rich dad.” (I’m ignoring the debate about whether “poor dad” and “rich dad” exist or are part of an allegory. The use in the book of Fuller as a driver instead of “rich dad” eliminates the need for debate, so readers and critics can focus on the words.)

Fuller, or “Bucky,” appears throughout the book as an inspiration to Kiyosaki through words of advice in Fuller’s own published words and in private conversations with the author. This explains much of who Kiyosaki is today. Fuller made up words or changed their meanings to encourage people to see the world differently, or as he saw the world, and Kiyosaki takes the same approach. It works. People who aren’t accountants or have a financial education — most people — would first read Kiyosaki’s books without a solid understanding of the terms “asset” and “liability” in a financial context.

Kiyosaki, years ago, saw the opportunity to make those words mean something else. And those who accepted Kiyosaki’s version of an “asset” became life members of a secret club. They “get it.” And if you disagree, you don’t “get it,” and you’ll never succeed in the way Kiyosaki wants you to succeed. For Kiyosaki and his followers, a house is a liability, not an asset. And if you don’t want to accept this version of reality, the author’s books, lessons, and seminars won’t do you any good because you don’t believe.

These redefinitions and others appear throughout Second Chance, but it seems to be Fuller’s pamphlet Grunch of Giants that had the most profound effect on Kiyosaki’s life. The bankers control the world, the government is out to get us, and the military-industrial complex something something. Grunch of Giants is an interesting read, but it’s just a little paranoid.

The second trope is familiar to Kiyosaki readers: the angst for traditional education and the glory for real-estate seminars. This appears so frequently throughout the book that it’s impossible to ignore. Kiyosaki’s companies produce real-estate seminars, so it’s no surprise he’s writing about the idea of getting a real education through this method as often as possible. I don’t recall him specifically selling his own seminars throughout the book, but it certainly plants a strong idea in the readers’ mind. If a reader comes away from the book thinking college is useless and the money for college is better spent attending a real-estate seminar each month, the first place that reader would go is to Kiyosaki’s own educational products.

Again, just like invented language, this concept exists as a filter. If you don’t feel the same way as Kiyosaki about traditional education, you’re not going to read his books and attend his seminars. If you did, you’d probably think they were wastes of time. He doesn’t want you. He wants people who are frustrated or unable to succeed in a college setting. They will make good customers. People without a college education are more likely to fall prey to people taking advantage of them.

The third recurring theme of the book is an idolization of wealth. Readers who buy this book are more likely to have goals to be wealthy than to have goals that go a little deeper — for instance, to use wealth to do good things for others. It’s not the simple get-rich-quick crowd of the 1980s, but it’s a more complex, grown-up version of that audience. The way the author uses the idolization is through frequent “question-and-answer” sessions, where it is implied that the reader is asking simple questions which Kiyosaki “answers.” The questioner in these exchanges is characterized as envious, curious, and a little slow; the answerer is characterized as rich, sophisticated, and absolute.

The book describes an exchange between Kiyosaki and a few construction workers. Kiyosaki drives up in a Ferrari, and the workers are envious, thinking they could never afford such a fancy car. Kiyosaki, in this story, proceeds to tell them they can, and that it’s just a matter of owning properties that put off positive cash flow, and that can be done without the education that the construction workers obviously do not possess. And here in this story, we see Kiyosaki positioning himself as the wealthy but down-to-earth, friendly guy who’s happy to teach unfortunate souls about something they will probably never be able to do. It’s the whole premise of the book — and Kiyosaki’s career. The readers are the construction workers, and Kiyosaki’s got the Ferrari the readers want. Please tell us your secret!

In Second Chance, Kiyosaki goes on record again with a prediction: There will be a market crash by 2016, which is the same prognostication he offered in an earlier book. The author believes that the recession of 2008-09 was partial fulfillment of that earlier prophecy. Oh, but he later demurs, and says that if the 2016 crash doesn’t happen, it would be due to artificial propping-up by the powers that be; thus, Kiyosaki stands to consider himself correct whether a crash (to which the latest recession when compared would just be a minor event) occurs by 2016 or not.

The book contains a number of misleading charts. In some cases, the data being represented in these chats doesn’t really prove the point that they author is trying to make, and in other cases, the data is represented in such a way that it is misleading. There is one such chart that supposedly shows that unemployment is rising for workers with at least some college education. The chart makes it appear that unemployment is decreasing for workers with just a high school education or less, and that’s simple a misleading graphical representation of data. Kiyosaki is careful in the text not to make an inaccurate claim about what the data show, but the visual representation allows readers to walk away with the wrong idea.

What Kioysaki might be getting right.

These annoying tropes aside, and the fact that the book contains no index and makes writing this article very difficult, there are many interesting ideas within the book that are worth discussing. Here’s what I liked reading about.

Three types of wealth. Kiyosaki borrowed the concept from another author, but discusses it in detail. “Primary wealth is resource wealth.” If you own oil — actual oil, not oil funds or ETFs or shares in companies that are involved in the oil industry — you have a protection that those with only tertiary wealth do not have. It’s not just oil — it’s fertile land, trees, and other natural resources, and Kiyosaki includes gold and silver in this category.

“Secondary wealth is production wealth.” Those who work directly (and own businesses that) produce food or other products, dealing with the resources owned by those with primary wealth, you have secondary wealth.

“Tertiary wealth is paper wealth.” This identifies the majority of Consumerism Commentary readers and myself. Savers, those with money in the bank or invested in stock market, fall into this category. This is the “affluent investor class,” and those who will be hurt hardest by the next (or any) market crash.

It’s true that shareholders and savers have the most to lose, but that doesn’t mean that those with secondary or primary wealth are fully protected. Businesses can fail, resources can dry up, and there’s always going to be an entity that more powerful than you — and I don’t mean God. Companies getting rich with oil in North Dakota are now finding that their lives can be upended in a matter of weeks when OPEC decides the price of oil needs to be lower.

The Cashflow Quadrant. From Kiyosaki’s other books, the “Cashflow Quadrant” makes an appearance here. The quadrants describe the type of work one might do and how the income from that work can be classified. I’ve been in all four quadrants: employee, self-employed, business owner, and investor. The quadrants are determined by tax law. If you’re self-employed, you pay the highest taxes — but what’s different between being self-employed and being a business owner? Well, even when self-employed, your working to get paid; a business owner is looking more at the value of an asset — the business — she is creating.

Basic principles in psychology. The author addresses a number of aspects of psychology that should be familiar to any student who has taken an introductory-level course: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and a variety of intelligences.

I’ve written at length about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs here at Consumerism Commentary.

The latter looks beyond classical measures of intelligence like IQ, and beyond the two types that he feels receive the most attention in traditional education, verbal-lingustic and logical-mathematical. Skilled dancers and athletes have strong body-kinesthetic intelligence; artists have strong visual-spatial intelligence; musicians have musical intelligence; strong communicators and socializers rate highly for interpersonal intelligence; and self-motivators have strong intrapersonal intelligence. Kiyosaki adds a spiritual intelligence to this list.

Generalists and specialists. Kiyosaki points out that specialists are not suited to being entrepreneurs. They may be fantastic at one particular skill, but operating a company requires a lot of knowledge of many different aspects of a business or industry.

I lean on the side of agreeing with Kiyosaki here. Career advice tends to sit on the opposite side, often explaining that being as good as possible in one specific area is enough to get a great job and build a good career. The versatility that comes with being a generalist has allowed people who are more adaptable to survive better through the recession, and these generalists have the capacity to to succeed in any situation.

Overall, em>Second Chance: For Your Money, Your Life, and Our World points out the value in owning real-estate property and resources, but like all books, doesn’t offer too many hard details and doesn’t address risk. To go deep, the author assumes that the reader will attend seminars, and the prediction of a 2016 crash creates some urgency for the reader.

Honestly, when I closed the book after reading it cover-to-cover on a flight from the West Coast to the East Coast, I did feel motivated. I’m in a position now where working doesn’t add much to my net worth, and I need to start focusing more on cash flow. I am aware of this and I’m actively looking into ways to make that work, from buying web-based businesses that all ready produce an income (Kiyosaki does promote this idea in the book) to multi-family or corporate real estate.

The work I do today is mainly for cash flow, but it’s been more of a trickle than a gush. I have no interest in earning Ferraris or living some kind of lifestyle Kiyosaki believes motivates his readers, and I’m technically free to do whatever I like with my life from a wealth perspective. I’d much rather live off cash flow than assets, and the book has encouraged me to think about this more.

When I first began reading that President Obama was considering reducing the tax benefits for savers who make use of 529 plans and other education savings accounts to reduce the cost of education-related expenses, I was surprised. It has been my understanding that 529 plans, all though I do not have one, are intended to help the middle class by encouraging tax-efficient savings for education.

According to the statistics on 529 plans and Coverdell Education Savings Accounts, these college savings plans have not lived up to the expectations. The middle class has mostly ignored these options for preparing for their children’s and grandchildren’s education. Those taking advantage of the tax benefits might be families who may not need the incentive.

The tax benefit for 529 plans is simple. The growth in these accounts will accumulate tax free, unlike growth in regular investment accounts. When you sell investments and withdraw that proceeds from a regular investment or savings account, you owe income tax on gains and interest. You will also owe income tax if your regular investments offer any dividends. This is not the case with 529 plans. You can withdraw your investment or savings for education expenses tax-free, according to how the law is written today.

Most startling when reviewing the demographic statistics was the fact that families with 529 plans or Coverdell accounts have, on average, twenty-five times the median net worth of those families without education savings plans. Those with the accounts have three times the median income of the others, or $142,400 versus $40,300.

So while in theory, the 529 account could save the middle class money, it’s generally not working out that way. Despite the popularity of 529 plans among financial writers and advisers, it just hasn’t caught on among the middle class. That probably could have been expected; wealthier families generally are in a better position to take advantage of all that is presented to everyone. The same criticism can be made regarding 401(k) plans, which have been around much longer than 529 plans.

The middle class was so slow to adopt 401(k) plans that companies started automatically enrolling employees in the retirement plans to jump-start their savings. This, while beneficial to some employees, was a bigger win for 401(k) plan administrators and managers of the (usually expensive) funds included in 401(k) plans. In this “win-win” scenario, middle class investors receive a supposed benefit, while the financial industry feeds off a growing source of revenue.

There are a number of specific reasons that 529 plans have failed to take root in the middle class investment and savings portfolio, according to reports by and discussions with 529 plan officials.

The middle class has difficulty saving. Whether this is true from a financial perspective or just a matter of mindset, in general, the middle class sees saving for their children’s future needs for funding of higher education an unattainable goal. In many cases, families believe they need to choose between saving for retirement before saving for their children’s education, and saving for retirement is a necessity that can’t be fulfilled. Thus, the priority is always one’s own retirement.

The hierarchy of needs is real. Especially through the recession, the financial focus of the middle class has been on basic necessities, even more basic than one’s own retirement. It is impossible to make saving for the children’s future when there isn’t enough income to cover food and shelter. If you have to choose between paying the mortgage and investing for any other purpose, whether one’s own retirement or in a 529 plan for the children, the mortgage always comes first. Urgency trumps importance.

The industry hasn’t done a good job of marketing to the middle class. Half of all parents of future college students just don’t know what 529 plans are. Financial aid is complicated even without the inclusion of 529 plans, so there are two paths that one can arrive at the idea that middle class families don’t understand 529 plans. Either they are just not receiving the marketing message, or they are receiving the message, but it’s drowned out by the complex industry surrounding the financial requirements of a college education.

Parents underestimate the cost of a college education. It’s possible that many parents in the middle class don’t anticipate their children’s future expenses being so large that they would necessitate advance planning. They could be underestimating the cost (and annual increase in cost) of tuition or overestimating the amount of financial aid available in the form of loans and scholarships. Parents may be unaware of how the burden of student loans has grown significantly over the last generation.

If these numbers were illustrated better, even though some in the financial industry are continuing to attempt communication, perhaps the middle class might be motivated to think about the future needs of their children.

Is Obama’s proposal to limit the tax benefits of 529 plans and Coverdell Education Savings Accounts the right solution? At this point, we’d probably be better off working on how to encourage higher education through tax policy than discouraging it. Right now, wealthy families are more likely to take advantage of these tax benefits, so solutions should be focused on how to encourage middle and lower income families to save more.

Simplify the options. In its current form, each state can support its own 529 plan, plus there is a 529 plan that relates to private colleges specifically. States usually partner with one specific provider in the industry. For example, New Jersey partners with Franklin Mutual Advisors (a branch of Franklin Templeton Investments). Vanguard is a partner with several other states including New York and Nevada to provide qualifying 529 plans in those states.

On the one hand, choice is limited depending on the state in which you live (if you want to save money on state income taxes), but on the other hand, the information is often presented in a way that makes it difficult for investors to choose plans. If 529 plans were presented more like IRAs, some confusion might be eliminated. You can open an IRA with almost any investment company and receive the same tax benefits. 529 plans could theoretically work just as easily.

Another way to simplify would be to offer one 529 plan across the entire United States. All investors would invest in the same plan, and this would eliminate the problem of choice. Earnings could be tax-free at the federal level and in every state.

Offer more incentives. In order to encourage more middle class and low income families to save for their children’s education — an even more important goal among low income families because a college education is a necessary part of moving out of poverty — the government can change the way incentives are presented for saving. For example, the government could match, in the form of a credit into the account or in the form of a tax credit, contributions into 529 accounts made by families whose household income falls below a certain level.

Also, the government could consider a contribution into a 529 account a tax deduction, so a family that has an income of $40,000 and chooses to deposit $1,000 into a 529 would be taxed only on $39,000. That tax deduction could be limited only to households that fall below a certain income level.

Another potential incentive would be for the government to automatically create an account for every newborn child, with an initial deposit that can only be withdrawn after at least fifteen years and only for higher education expenses.

Increased communication. Regardless of how the government, the financial industry, or society at large decides to improve the feasibility of 529 accounts for moderate and low income families, the communication needs to improve before more people adopt these plans. Not only does communication need to be clear about the benefits of 529 accounts, but there needs to be a stronger effort to promote the necessity of a college education.

It’s difficult to see children from struggling families believe that college will never be an option for them, particularly when children find themselves needing to contribute as soon as possible to their families’ household income.

If education isn’t a priority, whether out of necessity or out of ignorance of its social and financial benefits, saving for education can never be a priority.

Do you invest in a 529 plan for your children or future children? If not, why not?

At the beginning of the year, I joined another investing challenge. This was sponsored by Motif Investing, who provided me and several other financial writers and bloggers $500 to invest in strategies each of us would choose. Like last year’s Grow Your Dough competition, this is a relatively short time horizon for me. In 2014, I invested in the brands behind some of the products I use the most: Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Honda, and Canon.

I invested using ShareBuilder, whose $6.95 transaction fees ate away ravenously at my gains both when I bought the stocks and ETFs at the beginning of the year and when I sold. This year, Motif Investing is the sponsor, so I am using that particular platform. After some time, I’ll put together a review of my experiences as a customer of Motif Investing. At this point, I can say it adds a social element to investing, allowing investors to create buckets of investments (to add to Motif’s own buckets). Investing in a bucket, either of your own creation or of someone else’s, requires paying just one fee of $9.95. And because each bucket can contain a number of stocks or other investments, it can easily work out to be a lot less expensive than ShareBuilder and many other discount brokerages.

With Motif Investing, your “friends” linked to your account on Motif Investing can comment on your investments and share their own market analyses. I have yet to decide whether this is a good thing; the financial news media is all ready full of so-called investment experts making predictions about the stock market; now everyone can fashion himself or herself an expert — though you can view someone’s investing performance as proof. If short-term investing results don’t even matter in the long run, this might as well be as useful as a gambling scorecard.

Here’s how I approached my participating in the investing challenge with Motif.

Following the precipitous slide in oil prices at the end of last year, and with the accompanying gas prices hitting lows not seen for years, I once again used some money — an amount whose potential loss wouldn’t hurt my financial condition — to make an investment where I thought I’d be able to buy low and sell high.

Using Motif’s tools, I created a bucket that focuses on energy, mostly oil and gas.

These are the investments I added to my Motif bucket at the beginning of the year, and in which promptly invested about $475:

If you’ve following along with the markets, you probably have a good idea of how this strategy is working out so far. My investments at Motif are already down 13%. The price of oil keeps going down, and prospects for the immediate future look grim. A Saudi prince and the nation’s oil minister seem to be warning the world that oil is in a state of over-supply and under-demand, and we may never see oil at $100 per barrel again.

But even if this is true (although the pattern seems to point to investments always finding new highs — eventually), most commentary seems to point to the price of oil rebounding eventually. So the investments I chose may have some rocky times before recovering. If I could, I’d use further dips as opportunities to invest at an even better bargain, but this competition is limited to the initial %500, and further trades would result in more transaction fees, which I loathe.

On the one hand, investing in oil at the beginning of 2015 with an eye for a recovery by the end of the year may not have been the best choice of an investment. I am solidly in last place, number twenty out of twenty, in the competition’s leaderboard after one week. But there is a whole year ahead of us, and I tend to invest for the long term. If the big oil producers are manipulating the market’s supply to allow the smaller producers, like those behind fracking in the Untied States, to fail, eventually that strategy will change, and the traditional oil sources will want their investments to grow.

Personally, I’d like to see a variety of energy sources eventually overtake those that are damaging to the environment. I’ve included a solar energy ETF in the portfolio to reflect that. I think, though, that oil production is still a major factor in the global economy, and despite warnings about “peak oil” for decades, the resource isn’t drying up anytime soon.

You can also see the leaderboard above, if you are reading this article on Consumerism Commentary rather than on a newsreader, in email, or on another website. Follow along with the twenty of us where we go to show that stock picking is generally a bad idea in the short-term, and people are better off, if investing at all, leaving money in an index fund that tracks the stock market as a whole. If I had done that with my Motif Investing pot of $500, my account tracking the S&P 500 would be down only 1.5% so far this year.

With all the negative news about the price of oil, I figure it’s got to go up someday. Here are a few gloomy articles.

One of the investment advisers I talked to recently but together a potential portfolio for me, and it included commodities, but mostly as a hedge. I have been talking to money managers at some large banks and investment houses (Wells Fargo Advisors and Merrill Lynch) to discuss strategies for my investments, and ways to use my nest egg to my advantage. For example, my asset level will allow me to qualify me for super low interest rates on loans — but in certain circumstances. And loans might be helpful as I look more into investing in businesses, doing more work with start-ups, and helping finance a nonprofit organization.

I’m not making any changes yet, but I’m considering the options that are available to me. I don’t like the idea of anything that’s going to cost me more money, but at a certain level of assets, even those tiny management fees (expense ratios) on Vanguard’s index mutual funds add up to a lot of money lost every year due to fees.

Do you think it’s a good idea to invest in oil or other energy investments right now? What would be your choice for investing $500 with a goal of having the best returns at the end of the year? Or shall we just stop encouraging market timing completely? I know if I absolutely needed my investment at the end of one year, I’d leave it invested in cash. And a cash investment this year might beat out oil, stocks, or bonds, anyway. But I don’t think so. What would you do?

Throughout the last year, I’ve been participating in a friendly competition among friends. We each placed $1,000 in an investing account (or multiple investing accounts) at the beginning of the year, chose an investing strategy, and tracked progress throughout the year. I gave the initial details in the beginning of 2014. My strategy was to ... Continue reading this article…

I’ll be honest. When the idea for this article struck me late last night, I had a definitive idea of how I was going to address the topic of conservation mode. But the clarity of day may have changed what I think about the idea. Throughout my life, I’ve been working with scarce resources. Now, ... Continue reading this article…

As of today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has erased all of its gains this year. We’re not quite in “market correction” territory, though. The S&P 500 is still up year-to-date, but it isn’t presenting as fantastic a return as was evident earlier in the year. We could be getting to the point where the ... Continue reading this article…

Neil Irwin at the New York Times points out that all asset classes around the world are expensive compared to their historical prices. If that’s the case, is there any investment class available that has the potential to provide great returns over the long-term? Stocks and bonds; emerging markets and advanced economies; urban office towers ... Continue reading this article…

CNN is sounding the alarm bells. The “Fear and Greed Index,” which is a strange measure of market sentiment, has passed the threshold into the “extreme greed” level.CNN is sounding the alarm bells. The “Fear and Greed Index,” which is a strange measure of market sentiment, has passed the threshold into the “extreme greed” level. ... Continue reading this article…

Two years ago I wrote about how I was “winding down”, whatever that means, after selling Consumerism Commentary, in the sense that I was looking to involve myself in new projects. I was considering, among other things, investing a portion of my assets in start-up companies. In fact, I signed up for a service called ... Continue reading this article…

After three months, my $1,000 investment portfolio, nicknamed “Feemaggeddon,” is lagging. This portfolio is part of an investing challenge, the “Grow Your Dough Throwdown.” It’s a lighthearted competition featuring several top financial bloggers. I have two goals with this portfolio. The first is to test a specific popular investing philosophy. Among those who offer advice ... Continue reading this article…

As I mentioned at the beginning of the year, I’m participating in an investing competition — well more of just a game than a competition — with several other writers and bloggers this year. The premise of the game is to start the year with $1,000 invested in discount brokerages of our choice, and track ... Continue reading this article…

It’s easy for me to look back in time and analyze the faults of my twenty-two year-old self. If only I had started saving and investing sooner, I’d be in a better financial situation. My younger self would assume I had forgotten what it was like for me during that time period, when I had ... Continue reading this article…

I’ve joined a number of other financial writers in the “Grow Your Dough Throwdown,” a stock market competition. At the beginning of 2014, each of us will invest $1,000 in the stock market through a discount brokerage. We can trade as often as we like, and publicly track our investments throughout the year. It’s similar ... Continue reading this article…

Looking for the latest 401(k) contribution limits? Click here. After two years of increases, the IRS is not adjusting the retirement savings opportunities for American taxpayers this coming year. From 2009 through 2011, the maximum contribution to retirement accounts — 401(k) accounts, 403(b) accounts, most 457 plans, and Thrift Savings Plans, was $16,500. In 2012, ... Continue reading this article…

Financial independence has become an important topic for me over the course of my adult life. It’s been a progression. First, I discovered the concept of spending less than I earn — simple mathematics but a behavioral change — and how that, in addition to making better choices, could eventually lead to financial independence through ... Continue reading this article…

First impressions often form the basis of how a young person perceives an object for the remainder of that person’s life. The object in question could be another person, a business, an industry, a group of people, or even a part of society. Deeply-seated beliefs are entrenched during several stages of formative development. Psychologists point ... Continue reading this article…

Thanks to the stock market’s upward trend since the recession (if the trend hadn’t been upward, we couldn’t say “since the recession”), policy changes that allow investors to convert traditional IRAs to Roth IRAs without limit other than the income tax bill, and perhaps even younger savers inspired to plan for their retirement by saving ... Continue reading this article…

About Luke Landes

Luke Landes founded Consumerism Commentary in 2003 and has been building online communities since 1990. Luke has contributed to PC World Magazine, US News, Forbes, and other publications. Read more about Luke and about Consumerism Commentary.

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